Eduardo Chillida review – sculptures that clutch at the air like a goalkeeper
A torso, a rounded head, one arm crossed and holding the shoulder, the other lifted, elbow raised, the hand gripping the back of the neck. The shapes are simplified and we might almost have seen any number of sculptures like this. Although it is called Yacente or Recumbent, Eduardo Chillida’s 1949 plaster sculpture, cut off below the buttocks, is clearly a standing figure.
It’s the first piece you see in Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s new exhibition of drawings and sculpture by the late Basque sculptor, and this early figurative work is key to what came next. Completed in Paris in 1949, it is better than it at first appears, not only because of its formal simplicity and concision, but also because it doesn’t just take up space, like a bollard or a dustbin, but articulates itself in relation to the space around it. Its presence is a kind of negotiation. It also appears both archaic – recalling early Iberian sculpture – and modern, human and abstract. Somehow all these things matter, even if it is one of those works that you might easily overlook on the way to the hot stuff.
Passing it again after looking at the rest of Chillida’s works installed in the galleries, courtyards and garden of the Durslade Farm gallery, I realised how pivotal it was. Chillida had great consistency as an artist. This can be mistaken for a retreat into a signature style, which it often is in many artists’ work. You hit upon a core idea and you milk it to death, every new work drawing on the capital of what came before, until it all becomes worthless. I have never felt this about Chillida.
There is always, in Chillida’s sculptures, the sense of a vital living relationship with the space about them. His sculptures clutch at the air, grapple and grab, embrace emptiness and give it a form. Chillida began as a professional footballer, as goalie for Real Sociedad, the San Sebastián football club, until leg injuries ended his career. The experience of having to intuit a number of ever-changing positions in space, defending a territory and standing his ground, were as great a lesson in sculpture as anything he ever went on to learn at a Parisian art academy. Sculpture for him was as much about space and place as the objects that occupied it. A lesson, too, were his experiences playing and watching fronton, pelota and jai alai, those games of wall and ball, where even the echoing sound of a hard ball hitting a wall found its way, as much by memory and analogy, into his art.
Before turning to sculpture, Chillida went on to study architecture, and he had a great sense of the porous relationships between interior and exterior, and how light, as well as bodies and the eye, penetrate and explore hidden spaces and compound exits and entrances, guided through a volume described by brightness and shadow. Sometimes, looking close up at his tabletop sculptures, you forget your sense of scale. All those steps, doorways, windows, those never quite vertical planes and never exactly regular angles, become an architecture of the mind. He once wrote about entering the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul for the first time, and feeling he had entered the lungs of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was, for him, a musical space. Bach, unsurprisingly, was on constant replay in Chillida’s studio.
Chillida developed relationships with Gaston Bachelard (author of The Poetics of Space, a hugely influential text for artists), the Paris-based Romanian philosopher EM Cioran and Martin Heidegger, who felt affinities between his own late thinking and Chillida’s art. But as much as his art was cerebral, and despite its proximity to heavyweight intellectualism, it remained intensely physical, unencumbered and direct. He learned to work iron from a local blacksmith, and drew as much from the smithy’s forge as from the Basque ironwork tradition. He also felt that he was at war with Isaac Newton, or at least with gravity, and with Euclid. There are no true right angles in Chillida’s sculpture, no absolute verticals. Everything, you might say, is a little bit off kilter.
Working in iron, steel, wood, granite and fired clay, his work also has a strong relationship to the earth, and to the rugged Basque landscape where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic, a coastline eroded and drawn by the sea. The positives and negatives, convexities and concavities of inlets and promontories, are also a kind of constant negotiation between one medium and another. He wrote of the Atlantic’s “dark light”, in contrast to the white light of the Mediterranean. Speaking of his Basque identity, Chillida said that the Basques were made of this darker light.
In the Lurra (Earth) sculptures, mostly made in clay, there are often fissures and gullies and rounded-off splits that remind me of the eroded rocks of an intertidal reef. Other iron sculptures make me think of the natural geometries of basalt columns, each one different, all the same. In one way or another, the human body is also never far away. Just as he drew hands and fingers, so some sculptures seem to be extensions of the human grasp. The earlier Yacente figure might almost be taken for a raised arm and hand, and his 1990 Praise of the Cube, Homage to Juan de Herrera, is almost a raised wrist and hand, the cube (that is not exactly a cube) in its palm. These indeterminate almosts and not-quites are part of my pleasure in Chillida’s art.
Looking at one outdoor sculpture here, Advice to Space VI, with its irregular enclosures and walls of different heights (one of which doesn’t touch the ground) I found myself looking with the eyes of a child, alert to the possibility of play, of hiding and jumping up, and playing some make-believe game on either sides of its walls. Play is as good a way of thinking about, and moving around, this work as any other. His work may be in some ways inexpressive, but I see its plainness as an invitation rather than prescription or dour emotional tone.
His works in clay, which were fired in great overnight conflagrations, had in their production a kind of atavistic happenstance. Things broke, came out all wrong. Chillida discarded many of these ceramic pieces. Fresh from the kiln, he’d smash them in a pit, which became known as Chillida’s cemetery. Often, according to reports, these were the most beautiful works of all, but for him their beauty wasn’t the point, their pleasures too easy. There is something ruminative in these clay works, although the ones that punctuate simple forms with drawn oxide shapes – near squares, and verticals that climb between their planes – approach the condition of drawing. They are conundrums of positive and negative, real shapes and imaginary spaces.
Chillida worked in large scale and small. Many monumentally scaled works occupy city squares and the forecourts of global institutions. But size isn’t everything and some sculptures are only big. Size is not the same as scale. None of the works in Somerset, even if they weigh more than 20 tonnes, escape human scale. The delicacy of his drawings and etchings also keeps the mood up. There are those hands again, as well as black windows in white walls, lit windows in black walls, estuaries and piers of black, and a succession of shapes that remind me of pairs of spectacles rested on a table. Perhaps that is what they are. He always said his work was more about questions than answers. Where did I leave my glasses?
Eduardo Chillida is at Hauser & Wirth Somerset from 26 June until 3 January 2022.
